SS #40 Time to back(3)

Yuder and Cordelia were born with talents that could be called polar opposites.

Reason and intuition.

Logic and feeling.

When Yuder asked if she was from the future, Cordelia knew intuitively.

Yuder wasn’t one to say such things without any basis.

As always, a sound logical structure had surely formed in his mind.

Rationality.

It was the foundation of Yuder’s thought process.

‘Though he doesn’t always act rationally.’

Yuder was a person, not a machine, nor was he a slave to reason.

There were times he gave himself over to passion and fervor.

There were also times he would charge into a fight right before him, knowing the chances of victory were slim.

For example, there was the time he’d slammed the item enhancement button, knowing full well the probability of succeeding a +8 to +9 enhancement was a mere 2%—

‘No, no! Not something like that!’

Shaking her unusually scattered thoughts away, Cordelia focused on the Yuder before her.

It was a young Yuder.

The sickly Yuder from a time before he grew tall and handsome, a time when he was even shorter than Cordelia herself, albeit by less than a finger’s length.

His face, with its neat features, was fair and clear without a single blemish.

But it was too fair.

It wasn’t a pleasant, healthy white, but a face closer to pale, with dark shadows under his eyes that betrayed his frailty.

But his gaze was another story.

They were the eyes of the Yuder she knew so well, the eyes she loved so dearly.

Yuder asked his question with those eyes, and Cordelia found herself nodding in response before she even realized it.

She felt she had to, but it was also a matter of long-standing habit.

When Yuder had that serious look in his eyes, you didn’t play around.

You cooperated as much as possible.

But at the same time, Cordelia felt a strange emotion.

A stinging pain in her chest.

A sudden wave of disappointment and sorrow.

They were Yuder’s eyes, but they weren’t Yuder’s eyes.

It wasn’t that his gaze was weak because he was young and sickly.

In those green eyes reflecting her own face, she couldn’t feel any particular affection.

Faced with a gaze that was merely observing the person before him with cold detachment, a surge of emotion welled up in her anew.

The gaze of Yuder that was always overflowing with love.

Those green eyes that, whenever they looked at her, were so full of affection that just meeting his gaze made her heart swell.

“Yellow… Storm?”

At Yuder’s call, Cordelia flinched once more.

And she realized.

It wasn’t a term of endearment.

Not the nickname Yuder used playfully and lovingly, but simply a name he used because he was more familiar with ‘Yellow Storm’ than ‘Cordelia.’

Cordelia nodded again.

It was less a response to his call and more an action for herself.

She understood.

No, she intuited it.

The current situation.

The Yuder before her.

That was why Cordelia was able to rein in the sorrow that had surged within her.

Instead of her eyes turning red as tears streamed down her face, she was able to face the current Yuder with a somewhat calmer expression.

‘If Scarlett saw this, she’d say I was being dramatic, wouldn’t she?’

Kaisa, who was prickly on the outside but kinder than anyone on the inside, would be disappointed, but it was Cordelia’s favorite friend she thought of.

Scarlett, who was like an older sister to her, had helped her once again.

Just imagining Scarlett’s huffing face and voice not only calmed her heart considerably but also brought a small smile to her lips.

“How… did you know?”

There was no tremor in her voice.

As she gently pulled her captured wrist free, her question held only pure curiosity.

Because of that, Yuder relaxed his tense body a little and spoke in a calm voice.

“At first, I considered the possibility that you were a fake.”

“That I wasn’t Cordelia… no, Yellow Storm?”

“Yes, but I quickly discarded that hypothesis. There wasn’t enough logic to support it.”

If Cordelia was a fake, a fake Yellow Storm, then why was she playing the part?

What could be gained by deceiving him?

Of course, he could invent a reason if he made an extreme assumption.

After all, he didn’t even know the reason he had been reincarnated in Pleiades and had suddenly awakened to the memories of his past life.

The only hypothesis he could come up with was that the one who reincarnated him was using the familiar Yellow Storm to lower Kang Jin-ho’s guard and manipulate him—but he discarded it soon after.

Because, as he’d first thought, it was too extreme an assumption.

So he considered other things.

First, was the girl in front of him really Cordelia?

Was she really Yellow Storm?

Yuder, in his days as Kang Jin-ho, had several compulsions, and profiling was one of them.

Observing a person’s words and actions to figure out what kind of person they were.

It was a habit that could be described as a compulsion.

Creating profiles for the NPCs in Hero’s Chronicle wasn’t just because of his obsession with being number one.

A large part of it was due to a compulsion where he’d feel uncomfortable, as if a thorn were stuck in his mouth, if he didn’t.

But Yuder had endured that compulsion and refrained from profiling Yellow Storm.

He hadn’t wanted to.

Whether they were a man or a woman, a child or an adult.

He deliberately didn’t think about it.

He had wanted to treat Yellow Storm as just Yellow Storm.

But the situation had changed.

Reincarnation and the awakening of his past life’s memories, and a Yellow Storm who was acting quite different from the one he knew so well.

He conducted the profiling.

He had only deliberately refrained from analyzing it; the data was already piled up to overflowing in his head.

‘It’s Nopok, all right.’

He came to that conclusion.

The girl before him was not a fake, but the real Yellow Storm.

But when he thought that and proceeded with his logic, several strange points emerged.

“Like what?”

In truth, one thing had immediately come to mind.

But instead of giving the answer herself, Cordelia asked Yuder, who narrowed his brow slightly and said:

“Too.”

“Too?”

“Too logical.”

When she had faced him in the Garden of Night.

She had brought up the cure for his Nine Yin Severed Meridians first.

She had also been the first to speak of the method for the cure.

The flow of events after arriving at the flowerbed had been the same.

“Because Yellow Storm isn’t like that.”

“I’m a little offended, but I’ll listen for now. Is that all?”

Yuder shook his head at Cordelia’s sullen question.

“Besides the logic, there were several other strange things.”

“For example?”

“The date… I mean, making me be the one to request the quest.”

It was both like and unlike Yellow Storm.

The side of her that wanted to tease him was Nopok through and through, but the content of the request, and the emotion underlying it, was not.

“And the actions that followed. They were all based on a single emotion.”

Affection.

Love.

An overflowing feeling of endearment.

Yuder—Outboxer009—and Yellow Storm were frenemies.

Online friends who, for five years, were at each other’s throats, yet didn’t truly hate each other—in fact, you could even say they got along well.

“So I considered one more new possibility. If Cordelia really is Nopok, then why has she changed from the Nopok I know?”

He was already in a situation where he’d been reincarnated into a fantasy world identical to Hero’s Chronicle 2 anyway.

He considered all sorts of bizarre possibilities, and soon, Yuder was able to select the most likely, rationally armed answer.

“Wouldn’t it be possible if she had an accumulation of time and experience that I don’t know about, but that she clearly spent with me?”

Thinking of it that way resolved most of his questions.

The reason she had feigned surprise when they first met in the drawing room, the reason she had spouted uncharacteristic things in the Garden of Night as if she’d seen an answer sheet beforehand, and—the reason she showed him an affection so overwhelming he truly couldn’t comprehend it.

After listening to all of Yuder’s explanation, which flowed as smoothly as water, Cordelia pouted her lips and then asked an unexpected question.

“Was it… awkward? I mean, my acting on the first day.”

I was pretty confident, honestly.

It was an odd question, and for that reason, a very Cordelia-like one. Yuder narrowed his eyes and replied.

“To be honest, it was quite good. If I hadn’t reviewed the situation several times, I probably would have missed it.”

Yuder stopped himself from saying, ‘It was acting that nearly rivaled Natasha’s,’ composed his expression, and spoke again.

“Anyway… I’d like you to tell me the circumstances. How you came from the future, what this situation is, and what on earth happened in the future.”

At Yuder’s question, Cordelia let out a long breath and let her shoulders slump.

“First of all, I don’t really know why I suddenly came to the past. So let’s leave that out and I’ll tell you the other things.”

“Alright.”

“You and I get married.”

“Huh?”

Yuder blinked, and Cordelia proceeded to summarize a very, very long story.

*

Yuder was thrown into chaos.

He couldn’t help it.

He and Yellow Storm—that is, Cordelia—get married.

It was certainly a huge surprise, but if he exerted the full force of his reason, he could accept it to some degree.

It explained where Cordelia’s overflowing affection for him came from.

But the stories that followed were different.

They were simply too shocking.

“I… I do things like that…?”

“Uh, yup. Really, truly.”

Cordelia nodded, smiling from ear to ear.

She herself was embarrassed to be saying these things, but they were all true, and watching the Yuder before her squirm in mortification was just too much fun.

“Why? You think I’m lying?”

“No, it’s not… that. But still, even so…”

Yuder was quite good at objective self-assessment.

He was also well aware of how he had teased Nopok every month when the rankings were tallied.

So if he had acted like an elementary school brat offline as well, it would have been a bit of a shock, but he would have been able to understand it.

But the heart of Cordelia’s story wasn’t about that sort of thing.

It was about the things Yuder did to win Cordelia’s love.

The countless doting, foolishly fond things he did after winning her love—no, even before he won it.

“My… princess?”

“Yup yup, you called me that every single day.”

I said something that’s embarrassing to even type in an online chat, out loud?

“When we camped out, you’d bring me washing water in the morning that was neither too hot nor too cold, and you always cooked delicious meals. You always offered me a piggyback ride, saying my legs would hurt if I walked too much. And in the capital, you always held my hand and escorted me wherever we went.”

“Did I, by any chance, lose a bet or something and have to act as your slave?”

“Nope, nothing like that. You just did it all on your own.”

And that wasn’t all.

All the things that happened in the Wild Lands.

Yuder’s grand ‘Operation: Make It a Fait Accompli,’ which Cordelia now knew all too well.

All the cringey things he did in the capital, and the deliberate words and actions he used to meticulously make Cordelia naturally become dyed in his color.

Yuder felt a cold sweat trickle down his back.

The more he heard, the stronger two simultaneous thoughts became.

I can’t believe it.

It sounds plausible.

He found it hard to believe that his future self would become so utterly ruined (?).

But as he listened to Cordelia’s story, the thought that these actions were indeed very much like him also grew stronger.

They were all things Yuder himself would likely do to win her love, if he truly fell in love with the Cordelia before him.

‘S-Still.’

It was still hard to believe.

It was a rare occasion for Yuder, but his reasons were more emotional than logical.

To think that he would fall head over heels for the frenemy he’d teased online for five years, not even knowing if they were a man or a woman, and become a slave to love.

‘No, that’s not all.’

Cordelia’s long-winded story also included mentions of their ‘past lives.’

The long, long connection between Yuder and Cordelia.

The two who had always met in a world that had been destroyed time and again, and had always loved each other deeply.

This wasn’t a simple story of falling in love.

It was the story of lovers connected by a love so pure and devoted it seemed to come from a myth or legend.

Could it be true?

Are Cordelia and I really connected by such a deep bond?

As a question flickered in his chaos-filled green eyes, Cordelia suddenly flashed a jet-black smile.

“Then, want to test it?”

“A test…?”

“An experiment, if you will.”

Her face was full of mischief, as if she were about to play a prank, but to Yuder, it looked a little different.

‘L-Lewd.’

Was it a similar feeling to a drunk Natasha?

No, it wasn’t just that.

This was far more potent.

Cordelia leaned her body further forward, and Yuder, who had reflexively backed away as if to flee, realized something.

The wall behind him.

There was nowhere left to run.

The Cordelia before him drew closer and closer.

By the time he confirmed the wall at his back and looked forward again, they were already close enough for their breaths to mingle.

Cordelia placed both hands on the wall.

She faced the Yuder right in front of her and said:

“Whether we’re really a fantasy couple or not.”

Whether you, Yuder, are the owner of a pure love who has loved Cordelia since your past lives, or not.

“H-How?”

Yuder’s face was completely red as he forced out a garbled voice. Cordelia gave a sly and bewitching smile, then took the right hand that had been on the wall and caressed his cheek.

Watching Yuder flinch and let out a faint moan, she felt a strange sadistic urge and a sense of pleasure as she swallowed dryly.

Feeling her heart begin to pound, she whispered to the Yuder who could neither meet her eyes nor look away, her breath hot against his skin.

“Like this.”

Because I’m the Cordelia from the future.

Because I’m the Black Cordelia whose once-pure heart was turned jet-black because of a certain someone.

Yuder squeezed his eyes shut, and Cordelia smiled again.

She gently pressed her lips to his.

---

Translated By: Meher (RaidenTL)

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